PARIS — Being an Olympian can be thrilling and exhausting, joyful and heartbreaking, patriotic and ego-stroking, and for a few, it can even be lucrative, but at some point, for almost every athlete here, it is lonely. Hours in the pool or the track or on a bike or a horse; months of ailing and rehabbing and pushing and waiting; days filled with car drives and train rides and transoceanic flights.
Kanak Jha knows lonely. He knows it quite well. At age 15, he left California for Sweden while he was still in high school to chase his table-tennis dream—his sister, Prachi, went with him—and he eventually settled in Germany. At 16, he qualified for the Rio Olympics in 2016, as the youngest member of Team USA, but lost early. Five years later, he competed in Tokyo, and again lost early. He was on track to make it to the Games for a third time when he got suspended, in March 2023, for a drug-testing violation.
